Steal the Vote 2004, part 8
Last night the BBC2 newporgramme Newsnight revealed details
of a Republican plan to disrupt voting in predominantely black (and hence Democratic voting) districts in Jacksonville Florida:
Two e-mails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign’s national research director in Washington DC, contain a 15-page so-called “caging list”.
It lists 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly black and traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville, Florida.
An elections supervisor in Tallahassee, when shown the list, told Newsnight: “The only possible reason why they would keep such a thing is to challenge voters on election day.”
A realplayer clip of the report is available today and tomorrow.
Republican partisans will try and pretend it is all legal and aboveboard to stop people from voting because of alleged “irregularities” in their personal data, but
reminder two things: First, in 2000, even before the elections they managed to stop thousands of black Americans in Florida from voting who had every right to do so, because they were put on a felons list. Second, when it looked like it was the absentee ballots of oversea soldiers that might give their boy the election, they did everything in their power to get each and every one of those with a vote for bBush counted, whether or not these were dated after the election, were valid ballots or were cast by people who had already voted…